


Of Lakes And Love

by jungle_ride



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-19 07:45:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12406080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jungle_ride/pseuds/jungle_ride
Summary: Her face, all soft curves and silky skin, is turned upwards towards the light of the sun in a fixed expression of contentment. Eyelids closed, mouth parted and upturned in a wistful smile. Gilli can hardly catch his breath as he watches her, his heart swelling in his chest till all he can feel is the steady thump inside him and the serenity her presence brings him, pulsing in his veins. She really is something to behold. His lady of the lake.





	Of Lakes And Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agirlnamedtruth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agirlnamedtruth/gifts).



> So after writing a few angst filled, dark fics,I really fancied turning the tables and writing something indulgent that was completely happy. All sunshine's and rainbows! This couple spoke to me straight away as the perfect pair to do something warm and fluffy with so as you requested I let my muse do it's thing and just went it. I really hope enjoy this.

Gilli’s fingertips run gently though the hair of the women whose head is nestled in his lap. Her hair is sprawled out cascading over his knee like a waterfall. The dark colour of her flowing locks reminds him of a night sky. A blanket of midnight colour that shimmers with hidden light, it’s peaceful but full of mystique too. Gilli’s mind, which is often consumed by troubled thoughts and flashes of his past; of the father he had thought a coward and the mistakes his own hands have carved, calms as his fingers repetitively immerse themselves in the velvety waves of her hair.

Her face, all soft curves and silky skin, is turned upwards towards the light of the sun in a fixed expression of contentment. Eyelids closed, mouth parted and upturned in a wistful smile. Gilli can hardly catch his breath as he watches her, his heart swelling in his chest till all he can feel is the steady thump inside him and the serenity her presence brings him, pulsing in his veins. She really is something to behold. His lady of the lake.

They are sitting on the grassy banks outside the cottage Gilli had built near the lakes edge. It is shielded with magic, concealing it from the prying eyes of others. The cottage itself had been built as a response to Freya’s argument of _“a bird may love a fish but where would they live?”_

The words had been thrown at him during an argument, only a few weeks ago, when the divide between Freya’s head and heart had thrown their blossoming relationship into a momentary spiral of doubt and despair. The complications of it, the sacrifices Gilli apparently had to make, seemingly outweighing the emotion and Freya with her golden heart had thought she was a burden to him and tried to set him free.

_“I can’t do this to you. You have to give up so much Gilli to stay with me. Your whole life.”_ She had cried, not realising she was the air in his lungs and that without her; he would suffocate in the unforgiving world around him. That he almost had. These sacrifices he supposedly had to make, the life unlived was insignificant to him. He didn’t want it. He wanted her.

Freya hadn’t given him the chance to tell her all that though, instead she had dived into the water before he could utter a word. Although in truth Gilli has never been brilliant with words, and so in hindsight perhaps it had been better that she’d run away, or rather swam away, in that moment. Never one for words, Gilli resolved himself to show Freya what he could not articulate and thus the cottage had been constructed that night, with the help of magic.

The cottage itself is a modest construction. Although built to make a point and so practicality had been more his focus, Gilli has still tried to infuse beauty into the home. So there are flowers and vines growing up and around the structure, covering it in a colourful display of green, white, soft pinks, purples and blues. All in all it is a quaint little thing that Gilli, who had never before used his gifts to create in this way, always so focused on destruction and gain, is very proud of.

_“Here_ ,” he had said to Freya had she had finally remerged a week later. “ _The bird will live here.”_

Gilli smiles at the memory and leans down to kiss the top of Freya’s forehead, a gentle press of affection. Humming she leans into the embrace, her nose scrunching up in that personised way that causes Gilli’s heart to hiccup happily as pure fondness floods his body.

The world around them is blooming in luscious colours, bright with nature’s beauty. Gazing out towards the water, Gilli watches as the sunlight hits the surface and bounces back in fragments of sparkling light. It makes the entire body of water glisten and Freya who is so in tuned with the lake that they are practically one, seems to glow in response. Untangling his fingers from her hair, Gilli instead traces the patters sparkling on her skin, amazed by the sheer wonder of it all. He still finds himself perplexed and yet forever grateful that she is with him. That she chooses him, each and every day. Although he has long since given up trying to understand it, instead choosing to try and be worthy of it, he can’t help but be in awe.

After all, every rational bone in his body screamed that this should never have happened. By all rights he should be living out his years, tucked away from civilisation, or in the more secret and darker parts of himself, purged from the world entirely.

He’s not Merlin. Gilli holds no significance in the grand design of the universe; he is simply a speck of dust or at least he had thought so. His time with Freya has begun to turn his opinions away from such places, instead leading him to new collusions that he does in fact matter. Although he may be only a speck in the universe, to Freya he is more. He is a world, with endless possibilities. He’s a heart that beats for two.

After leaving Camelot, he had looked for the smallest slice of acceptance; wandering the lengths of the land in search of a place to belong, until his legs could take no more. It had been a fruitless adventure. Wherever Gilli went, he was always the outcast. Belittled. Ignored. Sometimes he was feared, in those moments of anger when he allowed himself to use magic for destruction. It scared him, how much he had revelled in those moments. The power that had surged causes deep bitterness to rise up and law waste to those around him. Gilli had liked it, and that ahd scared him.

In the place of the hopefulness that had started in his meeting with Merlin, a new belief had begun to take hold of him. An old foreboding nightmare he used to dream as a child, the world would be better off without him. Black and brooding it had settled into his heat and weighed him down into darkness that coiled around his soul. Gilli had decided he was done with the world of man and resigned himself to the life of a hermit. It had been on his travels to find a desolate place in which to live out the remainder of his isolated life that Gilli had stumbled across the lake. He hadn’t known in those first moments how drastically things were about to change.

His thoughts at the time had been lost somewhere in angered torment, his body aching from loneliness. How strange it was, that the presence of nothing, could weigh so heavily upon ones shoulders. The lake itself had made him pause, its natural beauty captivating him immediately. The undertones of its magic had pulsed gently, touching soothingly into his mind calming his darkener mood.

Like a breeze on a hot summer’s days, relief had come. A moment of peace and then just like a breeze it had passed. A glint of light in the corner of his eye distracted him. Looking down towards the light Gilli gaze had fallen onto the ring of his father. Suddenly his mind had been thrown back into the rage and turmoil. In a fit of impulsive anguish Gilli had torn the ring from his hand, the symbol of everything he was, and thrown in into the lake. The regret and grief had hit him immediately, stomach sinking as the gold disappeared into the deep. Overcome Gilli had been ready to throw himself into the lake, to find the ring, or to be lost along with it, he hadn’t been sure which one he would have preferred. And then she had appeared.

Unable to move, feet rooted to the spot he watch her rising up from the water, the lady of the lake emerging from the deep her hair flowing out around her as a mystical white light surrounded her in a halo. Gilli had stared at her dumbstruck, open mouthed, and wide eyed and Freya…Freya had laughed her voice a babbling broke as she breached the water’s surface.

It had taken Gilli serval long moments before he could breathe again, and another ten after that for him to realise she was holding something out towards him. The ring.

Freya had simply watched and waited eyebrows rising curiously as she patiently anticipated his response. When Gilli found the will to move, a minute or hour later he bent down and offered an open palm. His voice, unable to form proper sentences, had stuttered out incoherent sounds. _Uhhhhh, IIIII, mmmf, duuuuuh, ummmm, ttttsssskkkk._

_“Thanks.”_ He had eventually manged to squeak out, as Freya had glided to the water’s edge and dropped the ring into his hand.

_“You’re not alone Gilli.”_ She had whispered, soft and gentle, her words echoing in his ears long after she had spoken them. Smiling up at him, bright and beautiful she lingered a moment longer, her hand in his, before disappearing from view back into the water from which she came.

A resolve to prove that it hadn’t all been a concoction of his imagination had brought Gilli back two days later. He had waited all day and by the evening had been convinced he’d imagined it all. It was at the exact moment where hope was fading that Freya had reappeared. This time Gilli had found his voice, forcing it out.

It had been curiosity that had kept bringing Gilli back, until that curiosity had formed a friendship between them. Friendship had flowed effortlessly into something more as their bond grew. Neither had realised the thread winding its self around them, connecting and binding them together. So natural of a progression that Gilli cannot remember the moment his heart had become hers. Perhaps it had always been that way; Gilli likes to think so anyway. “ _Romantic at heart”,_ that was what Freya always told him.

“I can practically hear your thoughts they’re so loud. What _are_ you thinking?” Freya’s voice, tone dreamlike, drifts up bringing Gilli out of his thoughts gently. Eyes still closed Freya reaches up blindly to find his face, tracing the angles and edges of it, caressing his face lovingly.

“Oh, nothing.” Gill mumbles pressing a kiss into her palm.

“Really?” Freya hums, unconvinced. Gilli shrugs and then realises Freya’s eyes are still closed so the gesture is lost on her.

“I was just thinking is all.” He says. Freya opening her eyes, quips an eyebrow and Gilli just shrugs again.

“Well that clears that up.” Freya laughs, shaking her head at him and leaning up to kiss him lightly. It’s a chaste kiss, a quick press of lips but as she pulls back Gilli can feel the affection she had for him radiating off her. Gilli can’t help himself and the words she’d made him promise not to say until he was sure that this life with her was enough for him, come tumbling out.

“I love you.” The words come out so naturally, like a breath that Gilli barely registers the weight of them until he hears the sharp intake of breath Freya takes. Where a moment ago she had been caught somewhere between dreams and reality; her focus is now suddenly fixed onto him.

“You sure?” she ask after a moment’s hesitation. There’s a hopeful happiness that shines in her brown iris’s now as she look up at him. Gilli would happily drown in it.

“I love you.” He says again. The first time he had said it, it had come out unintentionally; or rather unconsciously for the intent of them was resolute. This time his voice is strong, weighted down with complete surety. There can be no doubt.

“I love you too.” She says, her mouth morphing into a wide grin.

“Good.” Is all Gilli can manage in reply which earns him one of her sunshine giggles, his heart is so light he wonders if it might just float away into the sky. Sometimes, especially in this moment, Gilli still wonders if all this is a dream.

If it is, he prays he never wakes.


End file.
